About Me

I'm a freelance writer specializing in the history of the Ozarks and surrounding region. I've written twelve nonfiction books, two novels, and numerous articles. My latest books are Murder and Mayhem in Missouri; The Siege of Lexington, Missouri: the Battle of the Hemp Bales; and A Concise Encyclopedia of the Ozarks.

Saturday, July 28, 2012

Hudson & Blount Again

I've written previously, both on this blog and in my Desperadoes book, about George Hudson and Bud Blount, perhaps the two most notorious of a whole slew of notorious men who came out of Granby, Missouri, during the post-Civil War days. However, I ran onto a newspaper story in a historic Colorado newspaper recently that sheds new light on a criminal episode in which the two desperadoes were involved in 1879 at Granite, Colorado.
After making a notorious name for themselves in Missouri during the early and mid 1870s, the pair took off for Colorado in the late 1870s and promptly resumed their criminal careers around the booming mining town of Leadville. Based mainly on information supplied by Blount after he was arrested for murder back in Missouri in the early 1890s, I said in my Desperadoes book that he and Hudson waylaid a man named Shultz at Granite Pass in early June 1879 and stole from 1,500 to 1,700 dollars from him. The real facts, as revealed by the newspaper report I recently read, are slightly different. The incident took place in late May, not early June, and it took place at Granite (17 miles south of Leadville), not Granite Pass (which is a completely different place in Colorado) Also, the man, whose full name was Henry Shultz (or Schultz), wasn't exactly waylaid, if you think of "waylaid" as being ambushed along the road somewhere. Instead, Schultz was a storekeeper at Granite, and Blount and Hudson walked into his store and promptly struck him a heavy blow on the head. They then stole $1,500 and absconded to a nearby saloon, where they joined in a card game. As Blount and Hudson were wont to do, they soon got into a barroom brawl with another customer of the saloon, a blacksmith named William Ward. Ward reportedly gave one of the desperadoes a thrashing, and he (either Blount or Hudson) marched out of the saloon and promptly returned with a pistol. The outlaw fired a single shot at Ward, killing him instantly, and the two hombres made their escape before the shocked bystanders could do anything about it. The Colorado newspaper did not identify either Blount or Hudson by name, but based on similarities between the newspaper story and the story Blount told from his jail cell (later corroborated by Mr. Schultz), it is obvious that the Granite crimes were the work of the Granby desperadoes.

My book entitled The Civil War on the Lower Kansas-Missouri Border touches somewhat on Barton and Dade counties. For instance, I chronicle Kinch West's raid on Melville (Dadeville) and Quantrill's two raids on Lamar, but I don't have a separate chapter devoted entirely to either Barton or Dade. I'm not familiar with either of the men you mention.